He continued raptly, “The side passage should be narrow and low to conserve wood. The shoring planks can be sawed in three to make its walls. We should be able to dig faster sideways, yet great care must still be exercised in breaking earth."
Afreyt broke in, “There'll be a power of digging, nevertheless, just to take the side passage out below the point where Cif and Skullick are now standing."
“That's true,” he answered, “and also true that Captain Mouser may have been drawn away we know not how far, judging by the swiftness and ease with which he first sank. He may be anywhere out there. And yet I feel it's vital we continue on digging from that spot, abiding by the one solid clue we have that we know is from him: his pointing knife! That's a more material clue than any hints and suggestions to be got from dowsing. No, the digging that we've started must go on, else we lose all drive and organization. That we're not doing it right now carks me. But I myself have grown too frantic for the nonce to do the work properly with all due precautions.” He appealed to Afreyt, “You yourself, dear, warned me that I was overspeeding, and I was."
He turned to the stalwart at the pulley and commanded, “Udall, fetch Skor! Wake him if he's asleep. Ask him — with courtesy — to come to me here. Tell him he's needed.” Udall went. Fafhrd turned back to Afreyt, explaining, “Skor has the patience for the task that I lack, at least at this moment.” His voice changed. “And would you, my dear, not only continue with the sifting for now, but also take on for me the direction of the whole task in my absence? Here, take my signet. Wear it on your fist.” He held out his right hand to her, fingers spread. She drew the ring from off the little one. “I want to go apart (I don't think well in company) and brood upon this matter, on ways of recovering the Gray One besides digging and dowsing. I think he will return here eventually, exit the underworld same place he entered it — that's why we must keep digging at this spot — yet that's at best the likeliest end. There are a thousand other possibilities to be considered. My mind's afire. The Gray One and I have been in a hundred predicaments and plights as bad as this one.
“Would you do that for me, dear?” he finished. “The sifting you can assign to Rill or two of the girls, or even at a pinch to Mother Grum."
“Leave it all to me, Captain,” she said, rubbing along his jaw the clenched knuckles of her right hand, which now wore his silver crossed-swords signet upon the middle finger.
Her action was playful, affectionate, but her violet eyes were anxious and her voice sober as death.
Snowtreader had responded as swiftly as Fafhrd to Cif's whistle, bounding out across the frosty meadow. He stopped before Cif, who was still signaling with her high-held lamp. Then his eyes went to bent-over Pshawri and the object hanging oddly from the lieutenant's rock-steady hand. He sniffed at it gingerly and suspiciously, gave a whine of recognition, and hurried on across the meadow a dozen more yards with his nose close to the ground, then paused to look back and bark twice.
Cif lowered her lamp at Fafhrd's answering signal from the shaft head. Pshawri appealed to her, “Would you mark this spot here, Lady? I think we should follow Snowtreader's lead and hurry on while the scent is hot, dowsing at intervals."
Using her dagger pommel for a hammer, she drove into the ground over which Pshawri had been hovering one of the small stakes they'd brought and tied to it a short length of gray ribbon from her pouch. She said, “I think you're right. Though while I was signaling I had the thought that the cinder we're dowsing with is Loki's. It might he guiding us toward him rather than Mouser, and I know from experience what wild goose hunts, what weird will-o'-the-wisp chases that god might lead us on."
“No, Lady,” Pshawri assured her, “it's the Captain's signals I'm getting. I know his vibes. And Snowtreader would never confuse him with that tricksy stranger god. What's more, the dog didn't howl this time, as he did so dolefully when the moon was high, but only whined — a sign he's scenting a live thing, no carrion corpse."
Cif observed, “You're awfully fond of the Captain, aren't you? I pray Skama you're right. Lead on, then. The others will catch up."
She was referring to the five dark forms between her and the cookfire and the other lights around the shaft head: Rill, Skullick, Groniger, Ourph, and Mother Grum, all grown curious. Beyond them and the little lights round the shaft head, the setting moon was just touching the horizon, as though going to earth amongst Rime Isle's central hills.
Back at the now-lonely cookfire Fafhrd poured himself a half mug of simmering gahvey, tempered it with brandy, drank half of that off in one big hot swallow, and set himself to think shrewdly and systematically of the Gray Mouser's plight, as he'd told Afreyt he would.
He discovered almost at once that his whirling, plunging thoughts and fancies were not to be tamed that way.
Nor did the rest of the mug's contents, taken at a gulp, enforce tranquillity and logic upon stormy disorder.
He paced around in a circle, breaking off when he found himself beginning to twist, jerk, and stamp in a frenzy of control-seeking.
He shook his fingers in front of his face, as if trying to conjure things from empty air.
In a sudden frantic reversal of attitude he asked himself whether he really wanted to rescue the Mouser at all. Let the Gray One escape by his own devices. He'd managed it often enough in the past, by Kos!
He'd have liked to measure his wilder imaginings against Rill's practicality, Groniger's sturdy reason, Mother Grum's dogmatic witch-reasonings, or Ourph's Mingol fatalism. But they'd all traipsed off after the dowsers. He'd told Afreyt he wanted solitude, but now he asked himself how was a man to think without talking? He felt confused, light-headed, light in other ways, as if a puff of wind might knock him down.
He looked at the things around him: the fire, the soup, the piled lumber, the girls’ clothes warming, the shelter tent, its cots.
He didn't need to talk to children, he told himself. Let them sleep. He wished he could.
But his strange nervousness grew. Finally, to discharge it in action, he seized a fresh brandy jug with his right hand, hooked up a lamp with his other upper extremity, set out across the meadow after the dowsers.
He walked unevenly, veering and correcting himself. He wasn't sure he wanted to catch up with the dowsers. But he had to be moving, or else explode.
16
In the cozy nest from which she'd been watching Fafhrd's every action, Fingers roused Gale by yanking the pale tuft of her fine maiden hair. “That hurt, you fiend,” the Rimish girl protested, rubbing her eyes. “No one else ever summoned me from slumber so."
“It hurts most where you love most,” the cabin-girl recited as by rote, continuing in livelier tones, “I knew you'd want to be wide awake, dear demon, to hear the latest news of your hero uncle with the growly name."
“Fafhrd?” Gale was all attention.
“The same. He's just come out of the hole, cavorted around the fire, and now taken a lamp and a jar and gone off after your dark-haired aunt who's dowsing for your other uncle. I think he's fey and wants watching over."
“Where are our clothes?” Gale asked at once, squirming half out of the nest.
“The lady with the scarred hand set them to warm close by the fire before they all went off ahead of Fafhrd. Come on, I'll race you."
“Someone will see us.” Gale clapped her slender forearm across her barely budded breasts.
“Not if we rush, Miss Prim and Proper."
The two girls streaked to the fire through the frigid air and, looking around and giggling the while, hurried into their toasty clothes as swiftly as if they'd both been sailors. Then they moved out hand in hand, following Fafhrd's lamp, while the last sliver of full moon hid itself behind Rime Isle's central hills and the sky paled with the first hint of dawn.